lery at Pomona College. Rice has curated a number
of significant exhibitions in the field, including the
first major American exhibition of La ́szlo ́Moholy-
Nagy’s photographs and photograms, and exhibi-
tions of Herbert Bayer, Frederick Sommer, and
Frances Benjamin Johnston.
Although well versed in the ideas and techniques
of such masters as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward
Weston, early in his career Rice preferred to raise
questions and push the boundaries of the medium.
In general, his photographs are heavily flavored by
Surrealism. and can be grouped into works realized
before 1973; the Wall Site series done both in black
and white and color between 1977–1983; and his
Berlin Wall photographs of 1983–1989, all of
which proceed in a logical progression of explo-
ration, realization, and recapitulation of what has
been discovered.
During the 1960s, Rice lived and photographed
in the Haight-Asbury District of San Francisco
where he was an observer of the hippie era. In his
early, more traditional photographs, for example,
Untitled (1968), in which fellow photographer
Michael Bishop peers out the rear window of a
Volkswagen, orUntitled(1969), in which a forlorn
young woman sits on a couch resulting in an ero-
tically charged image symbolic of the freedom of
the 1960s, there is a sense of mystery that often
borders on the sinister. These dark, moody photo-
graphs where the figures interact (or fail to inter-
act) with the surrounding environment seem like
stills from an Ingmar Bergman film. Rice also
fragmented his photographs and created pictures
within pictures resulting in strange and mysterious
juxtapositions.
By 1972, Rice, now using a wide-angle lens,
moved from depicting figures in his photographs
to photographing objects and empty spaces which
are suggestive of their former occupants, resulting
in a heightened awareness of both objects and
space. He photographed extremely common ob-
jects—a tripod and a lamp, a white chair, a chair
and a plank, or a black plank leaning against the
wall within an adjacent empty space. The viewer is
struck by both the absence of human figures and the
presence of objects and their spaces. They are both
suggestive and mesmerizing.
WithWhite Door(1973), a key photograph, Rice
began the Wall Site series. It is a minimal, stark
image where he captures the interplay of the dark
textured wall, light, and form. To the extreme right,
a white door is ajar. Its origins seem to lie in the
world of painting rather than photography, as famil-
iar subject matter seems to vanish to be replaced by
new dimensions of ‘‘the thing itself.’’ Light, dark-
ness, and a sense of the spiritual dominate.
After returning to Southern California in the
1970s to teach at Pomona College, Rice became
acquainted with the paintings of Richard Dieben-
korn, and later in 1976 he became familiar with the
color field paintings of Morris Louis and Mark
Rothko. Beginning in 1977, in the color Wall Site
works, now using a large format camera, he realized
that color, light, and scale are elements employed
by both painters and photographers alike. Rice
documented the interiors of artists’ studios and
was especially interested in the casual placement
of objects and the paint splatterings and waste left
by the artists. The result was an engaging and com-
pellingly spiritual series of documents; the images
challenge the imagination as the viewer easily gets
lost in color, form, light, and spatial relationships.
On a trip to Berlin in 1983, Rice discovered new
material when he confronted die Maurer (the
Wall—the Cold War’s universal symbol of oppres-
sion. Concentrating on the area of the Wall in and
near Potsdammerplatz where it had been a tempt-
ing ‘‘canvas’’ for both the professional and ama-
teur alike, he focused his camera lens on the Wall’s
rich coating of graffiti. Moving almost microsco-
pically close, he selected portions that appealed to
his artistic sensibility, in a process not unlike that
which resulted in the earlier Wall Site series shot in
artists’ studios. Rice selected from a continually
changing palette of often expressionistic imagery,
at times combined with pithy texts as in ‘‘Hunger
Herr Pastor’’ of 1986. He has described himself as
a ‘‘visual archaeologist,’’ but he is also a lyricist.
Since the dismantling of the Wall in 1989, Rice’s
photographs have become even more valuable as
historical, albeit poetic, documents.
Rice was the recipient of a National Endowment
for the Arts grant in 1978 followed by a Guggen-
heim Photography Fellowship in 1979–1980. He
received the James D. Phelan Art Award in Photo-
graphy in 1986. He has intermittently been a trus-
tee of the Friends of Photography since 1973. Rice
has participated in numerous individual and group
exhibitions, including during the 1980s at his Los
Angeles gallery, Rosamund Felson. His photo-
graphs are included in numerous collections in
the United States and Europe.
DarwinMarableSeealso:Adams, Ansel; Bernhard, Ruth; Caponigro,
Paul; Coke, Van Deren; Dater, Judy; Group f/64;
Stieglitz, Alfred; Welpott, Jack; Weston, EdwardRICE, LELAND